Classroom research is more than just teaching techniques and tricks, though; its basic idea might be best described as "the systematic investigation of the effects of our teaching on student learning for the purpose of improving instruction." It consists of two aspects: a repertoire of techniques for getting information from students about their learning and an effort to organize that information into a larger picture of practical learning theory.
The leaders in promoting classroom research, Patricia Cross (at University of California-Berkeley) and Tom Angelo (Boston College), frequently stress that classroom research differs from traditional educational research in purpose and design. Traditional research, associated with colleges of education and departments of educational psychology, is primarily concerned with finding the putative underlying "laws" of learning. Using methods derived from the natural sciences, traditional research idealizes a "typical" student by eliminating some variables and isolating others. This method purportedly leads to generalizations about student learning, generalizations that teachers can then use to design lesson plans and class work.
The obvious weakness of this approach to educational knowledge is that as soon as you reintroduce the bracketed variables in the real world of the classroom, the "results" of the research no longer hold in any kind of practical, obvious way. For example, the war in Iraq had significant effects on the ability of our students to concentrate. But nowhere will you find research like "The Effect of the Persian Gulf War On Vietnamese Students in My History Class, Winter Quarter 1991." But that's exactly what you need to know in order to teach them. Classroom research is radically context-dependent inquiry.
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